In Praise of the Emmys’ Poor TV Movie Category

Emmy voters are now halfway through final balloting for this year’s awards, making decisions about which drama and comedy series, limited series, talk series, variety series and specials, structured and unstructured reality programs, reality competition shows, animated programs, documentary and nonfiction programs and game shows they like best.

And, oh yeah, they’re also picking their favorite TV movies, although they probably won’t have to think too long or too hard about what seems to  have become the Emmys’ least consequential category.

It wasn’t always like that. The Outstanding TV Movie category has produced some notable television, including “Death of a Salesman” with Lee J. Cobb, the ultimate tearjerker “Brian’s Song,” the shocking “Special Bulletin”and 21st century standouts “The Gathering Storm,” “Recount,” “Grey Gardens,” “Behind the Candelabra” and even last year’s winner, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.”

Over the years, the category has often been lumped with the limited series category, and there was a time when TV movies got more Emmy attention than limited series. But that was a long time ago: maybe around 1991, when the movie and limited series categories were merged and the movies outnumbered miniseries four-to-two in nominations.

These days, though, the heat is entirely on limited series, leading to a statistic that’s almost embarrassing: While the five programs nominated in the Outstanding Limited Series category averaged almost 14 total nominations each, the five nominated television movies got a grand total of five nominations.

The bottom line is that the total number of nominations in all categories for limited series was exactly 100; the total for all TV movies was 5. In other words, there was not a single TV movie nominated outside the one category that was entirely restricted to TV movies.

This sorry state of affairs came one year after four of the five movie nominees received multiple nominations: eight for “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” six for “Prey,” three for “Hocus Pocus 2” and two for “Fire Island.” And it came in a year in which other contenders for Outstanding Television Movie were films directed by Oscar winners William Friedkin (“The Caine Mutiny Court Martial”), Brian Helgeland (“Finestkind”) and Peter Farrelly (“Ricky Stanicky”) and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael Cristofer (“The Great Lillian Hall”).  

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the TV movie is a dying genre; it’s just that it has been overwhelmed by bigger, bolder and more prestigious limited series. And when movies and limited series are lumped together in almost all of the categories in which they’re eligible, that’s become a problem for the movies, which are simply buried by all those high-profile miniseries.  

Granted, it’s hard for a movie to compete against the eight hours of “Fellow Travelers” or the seven-plus hours of “Fargo” and “Ripley”; even the three-hour-and-55-minute running time of the seven episodes of “Baby Reindeer” is significantly longer than the any two of the TV movie nominees.

Still, let’s not write off a category that seems to have fallen on hard times. Before voting ends, and three weeks before the Outstanding Television Movie Emmy is handed out at the second Creative Arts Emmy ceremony on Sept. 8, can we tip our cap to the five movies that beat the odds and at least landed their single Emmy noms?

The list continues here.  

“Mr. Monk’s Last Case: A Monk Movie”
Veteran producer-director Randy Zisk worked on almost 100 episodes of the TV series “Monk,” which was nominated for 18 Emmys and won eight between 2003 and 2010, with three of those wins going to Tony Shalhoub for his performance as a San Francisco private detective with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Peacock released the film in December 2023, and Shalhoub promptly picked up Critics Choice and SAG Award nominations. 

“Quiz Lady”
Jessica Yu’s comedy premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and played like gangbusters in front of an audience amused to see Awkwafina and Sandra Oh cast against type, with Awkwafina as a brilliant but reserved and antisocial game-show fanatic and Oh as her wacky and often out-of-control older sister. 20th Century Studios gave it a film-festival berth but released it as a Hulu original film, and the film won a Critics Choice Award and was nominated for a Producers Guild Award. 

“Red, White & Royal Blue”
When the Emmy nominations were live-streamed on YouTube on July 17, the comments column next to the video was filled with an astonishing barrage of red, white and, um, royal blue heart emojis. This category wasn’t even announced live, but fans still made Matthew Lopez’s Prime Video film about the unlikely gay romance between a British prince and the son of the U.S. president (Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez, respectively) feel like the most popular movie at this year’s Emmys. And unless Jerry Seinfeld is secretly working on “Unfrosted 2: The Dawn of Frosting,” it’s the only one that currently has a sequel in the works. 

“Scoop”
In the tradition of recent bigscreen movies like “She Said” and “Spotlight,” sort of, this Netflix drama follows the BBC crew that landed the interview in which Prince Andrew sealed his fate by defending his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. With Gillian Anderson as an intrepid reporter and Rufus Sewell as an uncanny Andrew (who knew Sewell could look so schlumpy?), it would feel timely if we weren’t too distracted by U.S. politics to pay much attention to British politics.

“Unfrosted”
And then there’s Netflix other nominee, in which director Jerry Seinfeld enlists every comedian he knows to tell an almost wholly fake story about the origin of Pop Tarts. Critics were unimpressed (this is the lowest-ranked nominee at Metacritic by a substantial margin), but hey, Jon Hamm and John Slattery make a semi-amusing cameo and Melissa McCarthy is the unlikeliest brilliant scientist since a twentysomething Denise Richards pretended to be a nuclear physicist in “The World Is Not Enough.” 

A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Drama issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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